Skepticism from a Godless Conservative

Decline of Christian Values Causes Mass Murder

It seems to me that after every tragedy, as in the recent school shooting in Santa Fe, TX. there are people that attempt to explain what prompted the shooter. In many cases, we may not actually know because the perpetrator didn’t survive. In those cases, like Sant Fe, where the shooter was captured, its possible to eventually learn the motive behind the act.

It doesn’t stop some from attempting to diagnose the reason(s) though. I recently read a piece, 5 Reasons Kid Become School Shooters, and want to focus only on one reason stated, but I encourage everyone to read the entire article and decide if the author is on the right track at all.

Its reason 3, The Decline of Christianity that caught my eye and from the beginning of the paragraph, I think he has it all wrong.

He begins by stating that suicide is a big no-no… for Christians and it’s a sure ticket to hell. Okay, I believe that, having escaped Christianity myself, I too was always taught that to be true. What a modicum of research online would have informed him though is that in 2015 (test data I could find), the CDC reported that there were 22,018 suicides by firearm. No Christians there, or any that identified as Christian? Well, of course the data presented doesn’t detail religious belief but I think it’s a sure bet that at least some of these were Christian believers.

Then comes a huge leap of logic where he states:

Christianity and the values it espouses have been retreating in America over the last few decades and they have a particularly weak hold over millennials.

There are data that show church attendance has been declining in recent years, but there are also conflicting data (in the same link) that show the opposite. What’s actually true about the first part of the above quote seems to be in dispute although there seems t be more evidence for the former than the later. I’m unsure about the rest of the above quote, that Christian values have a weak hold over millennials. What that data only shows is the lack of identification with any denomination and has nothing to say about values. Read a better article here.

Overall I’d have to say that the writers argument in this case is weak at best, idiotic at worst. It doesn’t tell us anything as to why someone would want to commit mass murder. Attaching the decline of Christianity as one of 5 reasons seems to be pure nonsense and the author doesn’t seem to either be able or want to justify that paragraph.

I think that no matter the tragedy, there’ll be those that want to use the lack of Christian values to be at least part of the reason, if not the entire reason. Sadly, there are too many that agree.